Off the Cuff / My Other Journal

To Live a Thousand Years? Oh, No!

According to a BBC news, we will be able to live to a 1000 years of age.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk/4003063.stm

Living to 1000? Not me, even if someone turned me into a knockout beauty.

Although there is some talk going on about people being able to live to a 1000 years of age, I think the idea sprung from a few warped heads of sci-fi enthusiasts. Give it up, people, I don’t want to be included in a dominant galactic force, ready to take over the cosmos, just because I have been forced to live too long.

Anyhow, it isn’t possible. Will it ever be? I doubt it, although there are studies for prolonging life. Such as, in the pursuit of anti-aging pills, current studies use mice or yeast cells, but a true study on a human could take 75 or 80 years, and if it is at all successful, probably the great, great grandchildren of Blog City bloggers may eke some benefit from those.

Coming back to that magical number, let us just suppose, for argument’s sake, I did live to be a 1000, ugly, beautiful, on all fours with a tail, having sprouted two heads, etc. No matter how becoming or unbecoming, I wouldn’t want that. For starters, even today, I can’t wrap my mind around the recent music. I want the fifties, sixties, or seventies music. Okay maybe some from the eighties, too, and a few select pieces from the rest. And it isn’t even a hundred years yet. Imagine nine hundred plus additional years. I would be so miserable with the music alone.

Then, what about the language? Some people have already started to talk in code. I try to imitate the youngsters with an occasional OMG, TTY, L&H, and thanks to WdC's ML and emoticons, I can maneuver around few expressive human faces, but it takes me forever to send a text message to my sons. One of them even asked me to write everything long hand. “Mom, you’re mixing up everything. Send me an e-mail instead.” If I mix up communicating in this century, how am I going to hack it at 999 years of age? Anyhow, by then, I bet no one will understand what anyone is saying, screaming, beeping, or writing; that is, if writing and speech survives by then. And if writing doesn’t survive, forget it, I’m outa here.

And what if the friends and family I have now wouldn’t be around in a few hundred years? I have enough problems grasping the reasoning of my adult children. I can’t even begin to comprehend the generational gap at my 1000 years of age.

And Heaven forbid, what if I --like each one of my friends, if they were to live that long-- become frail and decrepit and dependent? As a result, what if some people in some congress decide they should do away with us 1000 year olds for draining the world’s wealth? The possibilities of our misery would be endless.

Living to a 1000? I could accept this as a challenge only if science gives me a super brain, and that brain should never be based upon the one idling inside my skull now. I could give you more than a thousand good reasons for wanting a totally new contraption as a brain, but that’s another story.


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Prompt: Would you be willing to become extremely ugly physically if it meant you would live for 1,000 years at any physical age you chose?